Theory tells us that after a mass extinction, an event where the diversity of species is drastically reduced, nature should rebound with a flurry of creativity. Species should quickly proliferate to refill desolate ecosystems, something called adaptive radiation.

Yet, the paleontological record suggests that this doesn't happen at anywhere near the expected pace.Now, research published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution argues that understanding something called "morphospace" might help us find the cause.

Extinction events happen with alarming regularity: there's the "big five", but a host of slightly smaller, yet still devastating extinctions have peppered the planet's history.

Scientists now worry that we might be in the middle of one of our own making, so this makes it all the more important to understand how the natural world bounces back from such catastrophes.

Perhaps the most well-known of the earth's mass extinctions is the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event. This took place 66 million years ago when an asteroid smacked into the earth next to what is now the Yucatán Peninsula, creating the nearly 200-kilometre-wide depression known as the Chicxulub crater. This impact drove the extinction of all the non-avian dinosaurs, and much else besides.

Skywatcher Franke Lucena filmed a fireball blazing through the night skies of Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, at 04:01 local time on Tuesday 9th April. According to reports, the event lasted for about 5 seconds before burning up in the atmosphere.

Also that evening there have been 53 reports to the American Meteor Society (AMS) of a fireball sighted from the US, so there may be another sighting and more footage to come.

If you would like to report a sighting, you can do so with the AMS here.

The American Meteor Society (AMS) received 434 reports about a meteor fireball seen over Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia on Thursday, April 4th 2019 around 10:50 UT.

A meteor entering the earth's atmosphere lit up the sky early Wednesday around 2 a.m.

For one motorist driving west of Kenosha, it appeared that the streaking fireball had crashed near the Strawberry Creek club house and housing development. His 911 call triggered a response from both the Kenosha and Bristol fire departments.

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.